VOTD 12/5/2024

 VA: Hoisting the Black Flag (United Dairies)

Purchased at Fungus Books and Records

Side one: Lemon Kittens: Funky 7

Truth Club: To the Nile Sisters

Nurse With Wound: Duelling Benjos

Mental Aardvarks: Bogart Was Three Lemons

Side two: David Cross: Early Dance Music

Paul Hamilton & Joseph Duerte: Dance Music

Whitehouse: Her Entry/Foreplay

Mental Aardvarks: What Have You Done (Pieces of Meat)?

What a strange, strange time. This dates back to 1980, on the Nurse With Wound home base label United Dairies. (I always found the label's name delightfully surreal and/or random.) By the time of this issue, UD had released the first three NWW albums, and also their first albums by other artists: Lemon Kittens (Danielle Dax and Karl Blake) and The Bombay Ducks (the above listed Hamilton and Duerte). 

Nurse With Wound/United Dairies itself began as three people (Steven Stapleton, John Fothergill, and Heman Pathak, brought together by their passion for collecting weird records). Soon it became two (Stapleton, Fothergill) and before long just Stapleton. This record would have been released when John Fothergill would be still be involved. 

I was reading today that the cover image was placed in the wrong orientation (probably upside down, based on the signature) by Fothergill, no doubt to Stapleton's annoyance. Stapleton also complained that releasing The Bombay Ducks' LP was John's idea, and that he found it to be the ramblings of audio technicians and not interesting. Maybe some operations were just meant to have one person in charge. 

An aside: this in turn makes me profess my admiration for truly collaborative relationships that exist over long periods of time. Joel and Ethan Coen come to mind, though Joel has directed one film on his own. I guess they know how to delegate responsibilities. 

This record...what a strange, strange time. There's nothing wrong with releasing what is generally considered strange music. Was this a self-sustaining label? They must have been doing something right, to have released as many records as they did in the 1980s alone. And perhaps, with so few people releasing LPs that sounded like this at the time, they beat others to the punch so to speak. You want weird? Head straight to United Dairies. 

There's little question the centerpiece of this collection is Nurse With Wound's "Duelling Banjos". It's an abrasive, intentionally offputting collage of sampled voices (May & Nichols, Cage, Nihilist Spasm Band, probably among others) repeated for maximum annoyance. There's feedback, sometimes dense background sounds, grungy, punctuated bass. My friend Rich Temple in his college radio days (early 80s) would close every broadcast with this piece, in a blatant attempt to get people to turn their radios off. He was probably successful, for as much as anyone as listening to a 10 watt college radio station on a weekday afternoon. 

I knew I was thoroughly annoyed with it when I heard it originally, though it wouldn't be too long before I started buying their records. It's still "difficult" listening, though now it doesn't seem as interminably long as I once did. I guess repeated exposures, plus having heard more things that are vaguely similar, has blunted its abrasiveness for me. But only a little. It's still hard to take, but I admire the piece for it now. 

Also notable, if not as interesting, is a contribution by David Cross. David five years earlier was playing with King Crimson, nobody's favorite player in the Wetton/Bruford/Fripp quartet. There's also a pair of feedback pieces by Whitehouse, who was headed by William Bennett and friends with Steven at the time. (There's no credit, but I understand William was co-responsible for the NWW track on this.) IT sounds like....screeching feedback with vocals recorded through a long metal ventilation shaft.

Perhaps more interesting is the Lemon Kittens song, if you can call it that, and I wouldn't describe it as funky. Well, you know, given that you can bring up the tracks on Youtube at thi point, I guess I bought this for the collection. But I did want to give "Duelling Banjos" another spin or two, to see how it landed for me.